Saturday, November 8, 2014

The Mid-Term Election Charade

The results
are in: The Republican Party won at least seven more seats in the Senate, and
now controls both houses of the U.S. Congress. Disaster is in the making!
Right?

The
Democrats and Republicans spent an unprecedented mid-term, if not all-time,
election total of $4 billion, roughly $2 billion each. The giant corporations
that footed the bills for their chosen candidates undoubtedly will get
trillions of dollars in return, as is always the case in capitalist elections.
The working class, which creates all wealth, will continue to pay regardless of
who officially runs the country.

Indeed,
working people continued to lose ground in wages and social conditions during
the Obama administration’s entire reign since the 2008 elections, at which time
the Democrats won control of both houses. At the time, Obama won the largest
percentage of the white vote ever, almost all of the votes of Blacks, and close
to 86 percent of Latinos.

This year,
now that his poll figures have sagged deeply, Obama was invited to stump for
fellow Democrats in only a handful of locations. Speaking in Philadelphia on Nov. 1, Obama poured on the
populist rhetoric, pointing out: “The biggest corporations, they don’t need a
champion. The wealthiest Americans don’t need another champion, they’re doing
just fine.”

But the
Democratic Party candidates, Obama declared, would be the champions of working
people, “the middle class,” the “hard-working single mother” and the
“first-generation college student.” Is there any reason at all to believe
Obama’s promises? Let’s look at the numbers:

Obama
gifted only $30 trillion or so to the corporate elite in bailouts of every
sort. During 2012-13 he granted the great banks through the Federal Reserve’s
“Quantitative Easing” or “economic stimuli to the rich” policy only $89 billion
per month. The same crooked banks, the largest in the country, sold the
government essentially worthless mortgages. They were eventually fined several
billion, a mere “slap on the wrist” fraction of what they stole. No jail for
anyone! In contrast, George Bush only granted the corporate elite a mere
$1 trillion or two during his reign.

Obama’s
policies brought the stock market to record highs since the economic meltdown.
Ninety percent of the population was smashed, while the top ten percent
flourished in the context of the largest rich-poor gap in the modern era.
George Bush was a miser to the corporate elite by comparison.

Obama
raised the war and surveillance budgets to record highs, today approaching $2
trillion a year. Bush was far behind. Yet it was Obama, after all, who was
elected as a “man of peace and democratic rights!”

“Champion
of the working class” Obama created six million new jobs since 2009, 76 percent
of which were low-wage (50-65 percent less than full time jobs), non-union, no
benefit, part-time or temporary work at substandard conditions. Meanwhile, one
million full-time jobs per year, largely union jobs, were offshored to distant
lands to increase the super-profits of U.S. multi-national corporations.

Obama
reduced the official unemployment rate to slightly less than seven percent
today. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t include in its figures the 8
million “discouraged” workers who have dropped out of the employment market.
They have no work but are not “unemployed” according to the government’s number
crunchers. In truth, close to 35 percent of the U.S. workforce today has no job!

Obama
passed the Affordable Health Care Act, which gifted the health-care and
pharmaceutical monopolies a cool trillion dollars more than they had stolen
previously, while simultaneously robbing millions of union workers of
health-care benefits won in struggle. Yesterday’s “Cadillac plans” have also
been on Obama’s chopping block.

Obama’s
promised Comprehensive Immigration Reform disappeared. In its place he deported
two million immigrants, exceeding the total of all the presidents before him.
He even attempted to circumvent the law that mandates that immigrants receive a
fair hearing before being thrown out of the country. Here he took aim at the
50,000 children who massed at the U.S. border believing that they could
enter the U.S. to escape the U.S.-imposed poverty
and exploitation of Latin America.

Obama’s NSA
surveillance policies and his “interpretation” of the Patriot Act made George
Bush look like a civil libertarian. Bush never organized 1.3 security-cleared
NSA and other spy agency operatives to record all electronic communications of
all U.S. citizens and, indeed, those of the
whole world. Obama prosecuted more people under the Patriot Act and related
legislation than all previous presidents combined.

Weeks
before the election, when pollsters everywhere predicted major Democratic Party
defeats and loss of its Senate majority, the party’s top strategists embarked
on a campaign to close the gap by a massive effort to turn out Black and Latino
voters.

In the
Southern states that Obama won in 2008, via unprecedented Black participation,
huge sums were expended in mid-October 2014 to place radio and newspaper ads in
local Black community media. The ads, highlighted in a late October issue of
The New York Times, warned that Republican victories would mean “more
Fergusons” and “more Travon Martins,” as if the nation’s racist criminal
justice system were restricted to police brutality, murder, and mass incarceration
in the largely Republican South. Indeed, “liberal” Blue StateCalifornia leads the way in these matters,
perhaps second only to Texas.

Southern
Republicans, the modern-day heirs to the racist Dixiecrats (Southern racist
Democrats, themselves heirs to the former slave owners, Klansmen, and White
Citizens Council terrorists who ruled the South after the smashing of
Reconstruction) cried foul and accused the South’s post Nixon-era remnant
Democrats of “race-baiting.”

The
Democrats looked to a 2013 Census Bureau report indicating that in 2012 a
higher percentage of African Americans than whites voted in a presidential
election for the first time in history. This was the matchup between President
Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney, in which 66 percent of eligible
Blacks voted, as compared to 64.1 percent of whites. Similar statistics apply
to Latino voters.

But polls
before the current election predicted a significant decline in illusions in
either of the two capitalist parties among oppressed nationalities. A national
poll a week or so before the election recorded that the Latino voter
participation would decline by at least 10 percent, with one in three Latinos
stating that they knew of at least one family member or friend who had been
deported—under Obama’s rule. The percentage of Latinos who indicated
“significant confidence” in the Democrats dropped to 14 percent.

Fully 43
percent of those who were not likely to cast ballots, according to a Pew poll a
week before the election, were Hispanic, African American, or other racial and
ethnic minorities,—roughly double the percentage among likely voters (22
percent).

Hoopla
aside regarding any significant transformation in U.S. politics that will accompany the
Republican election victory, Obama’s Democratic Party strategists once again
signaled that the corporate agenda would be advanced with full force. A
front-page story in the Nov. 2 New York Times entitled, “Braced for a Shift in
Congress, Obama Is Setting a New Agenda,” reported that the president’s “top
aides” are “mapping possible compromises with Republicans to expand trade,
overhaul taxes and build roads and bridges.”

Translated
to the language of the ruling class, this means further lowering wages of U.S.
manufacturing workers to increase U.S. corporate competitiveness abroad, while
continuing to export U.S. jobs, granting deeper tax cuts for the rich at home,
and lowering corporate taxes on the trillions of dollars made abroad to
encourage major monopolies like Apple Corporation to repatriate its behemoth
profits with minimum taxes.

For the
workers, setting aside a relative pittance to repair bridges and roads will be
part of fostering the false illusion that U.S. capitalists might be considering
significant government spending to create jobs.

On the
Republican side, the new Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, admitted a
few days before the vote that his party’s pledge to repeal the Affordable
Health Care Act would go nowhere—and not only because the Republicans had not
achieved the required the 60 Senate votes to accomplish it, or that they can
utilize the special “reconciliation” procedure that requires only 51 votes, or
the fact that Obama can veto any such attempt.

In truth,
the year-long “debate” over this health-care legislation, which preserved and
qualitatively expanded this inefficient and inadequate nearly monopolized
industry, which is run for private profit of the elite insurance companies and
associated financial institutions, adds additional trillions to their
coffers at the expense of working people. Obama’s bill, and the Republicans’
too, are based not on “taxing the rich” but rather on the “Robin Hood
in reverse” thesis that workers must pay.

Obama, as
is expected, can technically veto any and all appeal efforts or legislation presented
to him for approval. The Republicans, in turn, have their own “strategy” to
supposedly advance their agenda. They intend to offer endless amendments to any
“spending bills” that might secure bipartisan support. The latter are often a
requirement to avoid “shutting down the government” entirely—that is, not
paying federal workers on the basis that funds to do so have been withheld.
This strategy was effectively employed several times over the past years.

In such
circumstances the ruling rich never fail to appoint special panels of equal
numbers of Democrats and Republicans to resolve supposed differences of
opinion. These are the “blue ribbon” and direct representatives of the
corporate elite who truly run the country. They are the bipartisan panels of
capital that engage in trading billions and trillions in taxpayer dollars among
themselves to advance their corporateand banking interests at the expense of
the vast majority.

The same
holds for the U.S. Supreme Court, the Federal Reserve, the Internal Revenue
Service and all other top institutions of the capitalist state, where daily
decisions are made in the exclusive interests of the ruling 0.1
percent. That was the scene in 2009 when the nation’s financial system
faced imminent collapse. The top corporate and banking leaders met in private
with the Treasury Secretary and the chair of the Federal Reserve to devise an
unprecedented bailout, which was in a matter of a week or less, approved nearly
unanimously by Congress.”

The working
class and its representatives are excluded from all capitalist institutions.
The U.S. is an advanced capitalist state
wherein its fundamental corporate institutions dominate public, economic, and
social life in accord with their interests only.

U.S. elections, today nearly year-round
propaganda vehicles for the parties of the corporate elite, are little more
than orchestrated “contests” aimed at convincing the “people” that they live in
a democratic society. A recent poll indicates that 60 percent of the American
people prefer a new party to emerge on the political scene, presumably one that
represents their interests as opposed to those who currently govern.

They
increasingly understand that there are no significant differences between
Republicans, with their more overt reactionary babbling Tea Party wing, and the
Democrats, with the “Blue Dog” wing of their own more overtly fanatical
advocates of the same ideas and policies. In the end, this charade that passes
for politics devolves into backdoor decision-making on every critical issue,
whether it be to wage yet another trillion-dollar war or to grant trillions
more to this or that section of the corporate power structure.

The need
has never been greater for working people to break from the parties of capital
and build their own working-class political party based on a reinvigorated and
fighting trade-union movement, as well as on the hundreds and millions more who
will be organized in new unions, all in alliance with the oppressed
nationalities, immigrants, and youth. These are the kinds of institutions that
the vast majority can organize, finance, participate in, control, and use to
advance their interests in the political arena.

These
institutions can and must also become the political expression of a fighting
working class that takes on capitalist exploitation and oppression in the
workplace, in the communities, and everywhere where working people fight for
their basic rights.

> The article above was written by Jeff Mackler, and is reprinted from Socialist Action newspaper.